Eruditorum Press

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Elizabeth Sandifer

About Elizabeth Sandifer

http://www.eruditorumpress.com

Elizabeth Sandifer created Eruditorum Press. She’s not really sure why she did that, and she apologizes for the inconvenience. She currently writes Last War in Albion, a history of the magical war between Alan Moore and Grant Morrison. She used to write TARDIS Eruditorum, a history of Britain told through the lens of a ropey sci-fi series. She also wrote Neoreaction a Basilisk, writes comics these days, and has ADHD so will probably just randomly write some other shit sooner or later. Support Elizabeth on Patreon.

Posts by Elizabeth Sandifer:

Outside the Government: Nightvisiting

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It’s October 29th, 2016. Little Mix remain at number one. Actually, the second, third, fourth, and fifth songs on the chart do too. The news is altogether more volatile; Parliament approves the long-gestating Heathrow third runway project, which isn’t that big. In the US, meanwhile, the far-right militiamen who occupied the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge earlier in the year are all acquitted and FBI Director James Comey makes a stunning intervention into the US Presidential race less than two weeks before election day as he announces the re-opening of the investigation into Hilary Clinton’s e-mails due to e-mails found on a device during the investigation of Anthony Weiner’s sexting of a fifteen year old girl while continuing not to disclose that Trump Campaign was also being investigated over its links to Russia. This has consequences.

On Internet streaming platforms, “Nightvisiting.” It is here the cracks begin to show for Class. It’s not that “Nightvisiting” is bad. Its ending is slightly misjudged (having Tanya’s effort fail so that Miss Quill can get a hero moment driving a bus into a tentacle mostly serves to ostentatiously deny the black girl an earned hero moment so the femme fatale white woman can get an unearned one), but on the whole it’s a perfectly reasonably constructed thing. It’s an effective execution of “the cheap one,” getting most of its mileage out of human actors in rooms talking with a minimum of effects shots and scheduling hassles. 

The problem is that this is episode three, and functionally episode two because of the (increasingly clearly bad) decision to bundle “For Tonight We Might Die” and “The Coach With the Dragon Tattoo.” Plenty of shows have resorted to the “cast members are visited by their dead loved ones” episode. But it’s generally a late-series contrivance—something you throw out to put your longstanding characters in a new light. Doing it as episode three in order to substantially introduce and flesh out two of the characters, on the other hand, feels desperate. And indeed, it leads to mixed results. Quill’s scenes with her sister are shockingly devoid of content, adding exactly no depth to a character who risks being a cartoon. And Tanya does only slightly better. There’s some decent character beats for her, but they’re all origin story stuff, and generally don’t relate to the character as we see her. The origin of her “puddle” nickname is indicative. Not only is there something slightly unsettling about the fact that Tanya’s nickname is based in a story in which she dives into a puddle of horse piss, this never comes up outside of this story and doesn’t actually tell us anything about who she is. 

A larger problem, though, comes in the form of Tanya’s basic arc in this episode. Last week Ram engaged with his grief and trauma and used an articulable lesson about it to defeat an enemy who was thematically adjacent and mirrored his previous inadequate response to the trauma. It was smart and well-structured.…

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Outside The Government: The Coach With The Dragon Tattoo

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It’s about as long since the last post as it took anybody to select the next episode in the BBC Three menu system. I mean, unless it autoplays. I have no idea. Anyway, neither the music nor news have advanced much in that couple of seconds. 

This gap, or lack thereof, does not do “The Coach with the Dragon Tattoo” any favors. In the course of a double release it largely disappears as “the one that isn’t the premiere” in terms of how Class made its first impression. Actually, it mostly just disappears in general—more than half the audience didn’t even bother playing the second episode, with only 300,000 people tuning in on BBC Three and 600,000 on BBC One a few months later. But taken as originally presented, as a singular item with “For Tonight We Might Die,” this was always doomed to be the smaller one, establishing what the show did in its default setting as opposed to setting the mission statement for it. The unfortunate thing is that this is only half wrong. This isn’t setting the mission statement, but it’s also not the default setting; if it were, Class would be a much better show.

What we have here is a story that looks at trauma and toxic masculinity via a Hannibal/Red Dragon ripoff in which a literal dragon eats people at a high school. This is, at baseline, fucking fantastic. I love everything about this concept. It’s like “the moon is an egg” in that you can just repeat the concept over and over again with the emphasis on different words and get a perfectly coherent argument for why it’s good, only you get more words to do it with. It’s just an intrinsically satisfying setup; one that finds a patch of ground no other show is quite set up to explore and does it. It’s a beautifully inventive setup where all of the parts go together and are still surprising.

Let’s start with the monster. The red herring that Coach Dawson isn’t being possessed by his tattoo but is abusing it in a display of gendered violence is a rock solid twist, but the fact that it works—that the show can get away with a fakeout just by having a tattoo that moves, a bunch of dead bodies, and a guy grunting “I AM IN CONTROL” like he’s a Robert Holmes villain shows an awareness of genre tropes that goes beyond knowing how to lampshade them and into being deft at transcending them. It’s obviously utterly wrong to suggest that this is smarter than the final six episodes of Hannibal, but it has a brash confidence that the iconography that Hannibal went to such gloriously baroque lengths to establish can be sketched lightly and then slyly detourned. 

More to the point, however, this is just a smart villain. The Robert Holmes comparison is apt, because Coach Dawson is in many ways a 2016 version of the classic Robert Holmes villain.…

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Outside The Government: For Tonight We Might Die

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It’s October 22nd, 2016. Little Mix are at number one with “Shout Out to my Ex,” with James Arthur, the Weeknd, Sia, Ariana Grande, and Calvin Harris also charting. In news, most of 2016 has happened. The US Presidential election is in full swing, Theresa May is in 10 Downing street, Jeremy Corbyn has survived an attempt to replace him as head of the Labour Party, and UKIP is in its usual chaos. 

While on television… well, actually, let’s start there. Class is on television in a sense that we’ve never really dealt with before. It’s a BBC Three show. But unlike Torchwood, which premiered ten years earlier to the day, BBC Three in 2016 is an online only channel following a round of budget cuts that resulted in the shuttering of BBC Three as a broadcast channel. This move contained a wealth of decisions about priorities and privilege. For instance, BBC Four, the more adult-oriented channel with a heavy focus on arts and entertainment programs, remained in place. Instead what was axed was the channel focused on the 16-34 age group and on experimenting with new programs and new talent. 

As a hedge against the obvious (and true) perception that taking it off the air consisted of some sort of deemphasis of BBC Three the BBC looked for some high profile programs to commission for the new online service. Unsurprisingly given that their previous Doctor Who spinoff was among the network’s biggest hits, one of these, announced a month before the decision to pull the plug on BBC Three was actually formalized, was another spinoff: Class. Tragically not the result of hiring Jack Graham to write an openly Marxist Doctor Who spinoff, Class is instead a series by acclaimed young adult author Patrick Ness in which kids at Coal Hill School (now Coal Hill Academy) fight aliens. 

In practice, this was a flop. The first episode pulled 660,000 people on iPlayer, with 1.1m tuning in in early 2017 for a BBC1 re-airing. By episode two, those numbers fell to 300,000 and 600,000 respectively. The BBC1 airing would eventually bottom out at 300,000, while the BBC Three version dropped to 195,000. Its AIs ranged from 70 to 82, with five of the episodes coming in below 80. This was in no way a good enough performance on the part of the new BBC Three’s flagship program, and so Class wrapped after a single season to minimal alarm and consternation. 

None of this is unfair per se; Class was in practice a deeply flawed piece of television that, in lieu of finding its own voice, borrowed several others, mostly Joss Whedon’s. It routinely lacks the courage of its convictions, slouching towards genericism even as it flirts with more interesting alternatives. It is frequently hokey and way too proud of itself, such as its invocation of the Bechdel test in its ninth line and its super knowing “it’s like the Hellmouth” exchange at the end.…

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Pop Between Realities, Home in Time for Tea: Blackstar

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Almost as soon as Doctor Who abandoned its post the world went to hell in a handbasket.

The first visible sign that 2016 would be a cacophonous disaster came ten days in when David Bowie died. Like Doctor Who, Bowie served as a sort of mass culture Lamed Wufnik; an enduring figure that lasted over countless cultural shifts steadfastly defending his corner, ensuring that the strange and wondrous had some quarter in any landscape. For a long time the two moved in sync—scrapping their way to the center of the culture over the 60s, co-founding glam in the early 70s, becoming shambling and gaudy wrecks in the mid-80s, and finding new, if niche life in the paranoid back alleys of the cyberpunk 90s. Then they began a period of effectively taking turns. Bowie held down the fort in the late 90s and early 00s with a respectable dotage that would have served as a perfectly acceptable final act, albeit one with the unsettled and partial ending of a minor album and a final world tour cut short by a heart attack. Then, as he pulled his great disappearing act, Doctor Who roared back to life. Finally, in 2013, they reconverged; Bowie re-emerged to drop The Next Day, adopting a new position of hiding in plain sight, issuing songs and videos as cryptic decrees unaccompanied by promotional appearances, interviews, or concerts. It was a perfect match for Moffat’s last act, the willfully abrasive and difficult Capaldi era. At last, the two enduring pillars of the British strange were back in sync, casting uncanny fire from the near shadows of popular culture.

And then they weren’t. Moffat’s departure was, of course, inevitable. The entire Capaldi era was a strange and unexpected extra, a second wind we had no reason to expect was possible. But it was thus necessarily borrowed time, a renaissance spent staving off a departure that felt inevitable in 2013. And in its way Bowie’s was too. Doctor Who may well continue til the end of time, but Bowie was always just a man, and men die. Like Moffat, he conjured a final act from nowhere, but inevitability has its way. The thing about endings is that eventually you get to them.

Psychochronography can be an art of apophenia. It’s not quite that one finds patterns that aren’t there; it’s just that one stitches them together with a spectral narrative. As I’ve noted, Doctor Who was almost certainly not designed as a sentient metafiction in order to protect Britain’s relationship with the strange. Nor was David Bowie actually the last line of defense holding the world back from a catastrophic descent into madness. And yet 2016 was exactly that. Scratch the surface of any year and you can find cause to declare it a miserable hellscape. And yet 2016 stands out. The grim running joke during the year was the litany of celebrity deaths that Bowie was the first notable one of. Every year loses some notable people, of course—2018 saw the deaths of Ursula K.…

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Cultural Marxism 8: Matter

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After an eight year furlough, Iain M. Banks returned to the Culture series in 2008 with Matter, the longest Culture novel to date. The problem is that it’s not entirely clear why he did this. Matter, to put it bluntly, is a mess. Were it not for Consider Phlebas’s intense lack of quite knowing what it wanted to do with this “Culture” idea, Matter would straightforwardly be the weakest novel in the series to date. The problem, from what I gather, is not that Banks has run out of ideas. I’ve not read Surface Detail or The Hydrogen Sonata yet, but they are apparently perfectly good books. It’s just that Matter… isn’t.

This is not a hugely controversial opinion about Matter. Most of the diagnoses center on the ending, which amounts to basically every major character in the book dying in rapid succession, starting when an ancient planet-killing machine wakes up with very little setup and eliminates the entirety of one of the three plot lines that had been occupying the book thus far, and culminating when everyone else dies stopping it. This has led to suggestions that Banks’s heart simply wasn’t in the book, or that he got bored writing it.

Color me dubious. The abrupt slaughter of the ending is too particular to be a mere product of laziness. Banks, who after all had a second career as a literary novelist, would surely have been aware of Fay Weldon’s 1986 novel The Shrapnel Academy, which famously and cavalierly ends with a bomb going off in a country manor and killing all of the characters. In Weldon’s case this is the cruel end to a blistering satire of class and militarism. Here it’s more of an abrupt turn—the book becomes a very different thing with relatively little notice. But there’s still a deliberate transgressiveness that suggests that Banks did not simply get tired of the book and write a two chapter equivalent of “rocks fall everyone dies.”

Nor does it quite work to say that Banks’s heart wasn’t in the book. The book is too substantial for that. In publicity for the book, Banks excitedly talked about how “it’s a real shelf-breaker” with four thousand words “of appendices and glossaries. It’s so complicated that even in its complexity it’s complex. I’m not sure the publishers will go for the appendices, but readers will need them. It’s filled with neologisms and characters who disappear for 150 pages and come back.” There are sizable enough chunks cut that he published one as a short story for a convention-exclusive book. None of this sounds half-hearted; it sounds like Banks tried to return to the Culture with an absolute barnstormer of a book.

And yet Matter is weak, and for reasons that go beyond its ending. It’s just kind of a boring book. It follows three main viewpoint characters (albeit with lots of excursions to other perspectives), the surviving children of King Hausk, the monarch of a race called the Sarl that live on the eighth level of what’s called a Shellworld—a planet comprised of nested levels.…

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Resolution Review

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*sigh*

I mean, it was fine in the sense that this is clearly as good as we’re going to get within Chibnall’s bold five year plan of “what if Doctor Who, only bad.” This is him firing on all cylinders, making a confident piece of self-consciously major Doctor Who that struts around like it knows it’s in its imperial phase. It’s the best script he’s written all year. And it’s perfectly entertaining, in a sort of straightforward junkfood television way. There are even a couple of bits—most obviously the parallelism between the Dalek making its shell and the Doctor crafting her sonic—that are actually intelligent, subtle, and interesting. As the Chibnall era goes, this is a triumph worth celebrating.

It’s still fucking crap TV Movie-tier television. I mean, you can see this from its basic conception. There’s no idea here other than “what if we brought back the Daleks with a real make them scary again vibe?” And so we get the bog standard tricks for that: one Dalek, its identity revealed fifteen minutes in, and we don’t actually see it in its case until fifteen from the end. There’s no larger concern here. This is just a story about how badass the Daleks are. We might fairly ask why, for the tenth Dalek story in fourteen years (and that’s ignoring loads of things like Day of the Doctor, The Pilot, and Twice Upon a Time where they appear in major roles) anyone thinks the Daleks need this sort of back to basics approach, but hey, we’ve had four completely distinct Spider-Man film franchises in that time so maybe that’s just the world we live in. Apparently it’s not one where we can use the Daleks in the course of, like, an actual idea. Instead we have to do this sort of sterilely self-conscious “event” that has no content beyond the franchise-level “the monster, it scary.” Except, no, this doesn’t go for any sort of emotional affect as nuanced and carefully crafted as fear. It’s just “the monster, it important.” In 2019, the Dalek is not a metaphor for fascism or for Nazis. It’s not even an existential threat to the series offering a narrative collapse. It’s a big bad in the sense that it is big and it is bad and there’s nothing else to it. This is Doctor Who reduced to pure spectacle, with no job to do other than sell toys. Except they don’t actually make a toy line anymore it looks like, so really it’s just selling itself, a serpent eating its own tail.

Meanwhile we have the Ryan’s dad plot, which makes up the episode’s drive for emotional resonance and aboutness. The actual resolution, with Ryan forgiving his dad to stop the Dalek, is certainly a successful firing of Chekov’s gun, but… I dunno, I just kind of feel like there are probably more people who need to be told that it’s OK to walk away from their abusive and neglectful family than who need a rousing message about forgiving them whenever they hit that part of the abuse cycle.…

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El and Jack Holiday Q&A

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Jack and I will be doing a live Q&A on the Eruditorum Press Discord server on December 30th at 6pm UK time, 1pm eastern US time, and a variety of other times. It’ll be a pretty open-ended AMA format with us chatting and talking about whatever you lot can drag us into. Sobriety is not guaranteed. We’ll release a reording of the mayhem as a podcast at some point. If you won’t be able to make it, there’s a channel in the Discord where you can leave questions in advance. Otherwise, we’ll see you tomorrow.…

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The 2018 Do People Still Get eReaders For Christmas Sale

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It’s Boxing Day, which means that it’s time to put a bunch of Eruditorum Press books on sale until New Year’s. This year I’ve gone with something relatively simple. All four in-print books are on sale on Smashwords for $2.99 instead of their usual $4.99. You can get them at the links below, using the coupon codes listed.

TARDIS Eruditorum Volume 1: William Hartnell: JK89H

TARDIS Eruditorum Volume 2: Patrick Troughton: VW79W

TARDIS Eruditorum Volume 3: Jon Pertwee: MK73F

Neoreaction a Basilisk: CC25E

I’ve also, because I’ve been slow getting them back into print, put my out of print books temporarily back in print in their deadnamed editions for anyone who missed them and is desperate to catch up. I’ve set them all at “name your own price.” I set a recommended price of 99 cents because they made me set one, but you should please consider the name your own price a tip jar. Do not feel bad about naming a price of free. All I’ll ask is that if you do grab them for free, please consider paying for them when they come out in upgraded editions over the next few months. Anyway, these will be on sale through January 1st. No coupons needed.

TARDIS Eruditorum Volume 4: Tom Baker and the Hinchcliffe Years

TARDIS Eruditorum Volume 5: Tom Baker and the Williams Years

TARDIS Eruditorum Volume 6: Peter Davison and Colin Baker

A Golden Thread: A Critical History of Wonder Woman

The Last War in Albion Volume 1: The Early Work of Alan Moore and Grant Morrison

Enjoy. We’ll be back next week for a review of Resolution.…

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